So... I wish articles like this didn't immediately veer into blowing up TRW and kickstarting blockchain onboarding business plans. 'cuz it's bullshit. It's the thing that makes the conventional financiers ignore the cryptofucks, and it's the thing that makes the cryptofucks fail to see the reality of their situation. And I'm not going to pretend I know why crypto is hot right now but I can guess and it's a lot more prosaic than Ethereum nodes on your cell phone. The fact of the matter is, nobody trusts the market regulators anymore. The markets throw tantrums and get their way and we're left lofting this impossible ever-continuing bull market. It's synthetic, everybody knows it, and everyone's afraid of how big a splash it's gonna make when it stalls out. Really, everyone's gonna be fine. "Capital" is not "stuff" it's an integral of "stuff" and even after an inflection point a bunch of people working together in a positive-sum system will thrive, albeit at a new and unpredictable trajectory. But if you can protect your money, you protect your money. And the thing is, you used to protect your money in the bank. You saved for a rainy day, and you put money away for retirement where it could compound interest. But interest rates have been effectively zero for the better part of a decade and large swaths of the world are going to negative interest rates, which doesn't mean you're going to see anything that looks like that on your personal bank statement but mark my words, the fees are going to go up. Meanwhile every financial advisor that has so much as glanced at Yahoo Finance in the past six months is recommending you convert a portion of your holdings to "cash." That means "pull your money out of the market where it can't get hurt." That's a retraction and it causes recessions which are completely inevitable at this point but the regulators are doing everything they can to keep things in the black for as long as they can so they're penalizing "cash." Larry Summers wants to ban the $100 bill. There's talk of abolishing the 500 Euro. Meanwhile Japan, which went hard into negative interest rates at the start of the year, is buying all the safes they can find. Gold is up. And we haven't even talked about China, where the command economy that pretends to be a market economy is having to get more and more command-ey in order to prop up trade. So. you want to hide in cash, and cash is becoming hard to find. You want to tuck it away in foreign accounts, but Uncle Sam is getting awfully nosey. You want to put it in bonds, but bonds are cratering. And by "you" I mean that theoretical rich person that you usually picture as the "invisible hand" not actually you because you're proud that you have a retirement account, even if it would probably last you six months at your current burn rate. So, you. Gonna buy gold bricks? Gonna grab phat stax? I dunno, real estate? Sure. probably all of those things. But anybody with a little memory remembers BTC at a buck, and remembers BTC at $1200, and knows that it can't be traced. Bonus points if you're a Chinese Tong since you already own the servers it's on. And for everyone else, Ripple. Ha! So. There's these kids, and they read ZeroHedge, and they dream of a post-economic meltdown utopia where their Ubuntu phone launches them onto an exciting future of Ethereum onboarding for fun and profit. And then there's grownups who know that even Weimar Germany had rich people and diversification has gotten a little more interesting than it was back in the '80s but in the end, wealth is wealth. And in their world, the most useful thing about cryptocurrency is the fact that it doesn't charge them a fee for existing.
I almost feel guilty for not adding text to the top. However, I genuinely LOL'd here: We are pretty much on the same page. Ethereum is all kinds of useful, and will only become more so, but IMO the potential for Ethereum to enslave is real too. The blockchain is not going to be implemented from a clean slate. At best (worst), we are going to get a global depression out of our current financial situation. Ethereum is going to inherit the sins of this system, and only over a long time will our society reflect some sort of new possibility. I have a fondness for essays like this that try to patch together big ideas, but I also found it interesting because Tumlos does Business Development and Strategy for ConsenSys. They are working with Ubuntu to get Ethereum running on every Ubuntu phone, and with Microsoft to provide Ethereum as a service on Azure. IMO the fact that Ethereum can draw people with such visions is good evidence of its potential. Although I see his sequence of events as extremely improbable, I do see an alternate economy evolving that does not jive with 1099's and W2s, and I see it coming fast. A global recession isn't going to change that outcome very much. I just posted this: Which is going to give the Commodity Futures Trading Commission a wedgie. Funny, MS providing decentralized options as a service. Here in 2016, we talk about how much USD a BTC or ETH is worth. The Central Banks are trying to burn the fiat in your bank account, and fiat has no proof of existence/ownership. As you said, they are turning over more and more mattresses. It might happen before it, but if a reserve currency experiences bail ins, we are going to start talking about how much ETH or BTC a USD is worth. Part of the Core/Classic battle in bitcoin is fueled by this. Regardless of where Bitcoin Core's small block roadmap comes from, I've come to the conclusion that many small block supporters are modern gold bugs that see the ability to keep bitcoin light as a matter of long-term survival. Many of them don't care if bitcoin can scale. They don't see it as a payment system. They might be right. That's one reason why I have not converted all of my BTC to ETH.The Great Humungus is eating Alpo out of a hubcap and you're launching an Ethereum onboarding company on your Ubuntu phone.
And in their world, the most useful thing about cryptocurrency is the fact that it doesn't charge them a fee for existing.
Personally, I think change will be so gradual as to be invisible. Most people don't know that Apple Pay and Square are only possible because of the Check 21 Act of 2003. It was a good 8 years before that mattered to anyone for reasons other than they didn't get paper checks with their statements anymore. For consumers, it's pretty much "whoa! I can take a picture of my checks!" but for interstate commerce it kind of blows a hole in the whole ACH network.